Community Onboarding Pilot Program ICANN62 Update

ICANN62 marks the conclusion of the ICANN Community Onboarding Pilot Program (COP). In Panama City, Panama, 20 individuals from eight community groups came together on 24 June to take stock of the progress to date and discuss plans for how each individual community group will carry its own “onboarding” for new participants, moving forward.

For those less familiar with the COP, here are some details. The program aimed to improve ICANN community newcomer engagement and retention rates through mentorship, knowledge, and experience-sharing.

The pilot followed a two-pronged approach to accomplish this goal; first, agreeing on the need to create, update and refine onboarding materials as needed to ensure that newcomers would have access to information that is easily understood and can guide them through ICANN processes. We then paired one or two newcomers from each participating community with more experienced ICANN community members. The exchanges between these groups proved invaluable in helping to identify key challenges and approaches.

Participants from ICANN's Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) worked collaboratively to create new materials and tools to enable a supportive environment for newcomers. One of the agreed-upon outcomes while at the ICANN61 COP meeting was the cross-organizational sharing of perspectives about the different needs each group has when “onboarding” newcomers. Many communities enhanced and strengthened existing initiatives with an onboarding focus, while others created new materials that not only support their newcomers, but are also used to inform the broader community about their priorities.

ICANN62 participants noted the important role the program played providing an opportunity for individual communities to better structure their onboarding efforts. A solid baseline of onboarding materials has been prepared; individual communities are now better positioned to carry on with the task of maintaining and updating their onboarding materials.

We encourage you to explore these additional materials created by each COP group here.

To view the list of COP participants and the program activities, please visit the COP Wiki space here.

Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to the development of materials and the advancement of dialogue both within and across different community groups.

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Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."